One year after Huang Zhang’s comeback: Meizu’s de-familyization revolution

As the founder and soul of the company, Huang Zhang's biggest task after his comeback in February last year was to personally untie all the constraints he had on Meizu.

"Although we were reluctant to admit it in the past, Meizu was more or less a family company," Meizu President Bai Yongxiang said. Over the past few years, many people have been accustomed to equating Meizu with Huang Zhang. Whether it is corporate culture, shareholding structure, or product strategy and driving model, Huang Zhang is the spokesperson for Meizu.

Meizu was once an absolutely product-oriented company. Unlike other manufacturers that invested huge amounts of money in marketing, Huang Zhang also stayed away from venture capital and only made one product at a time. He then relied on product profits to drive the research and development of new products and scale expansion, while he himself stayed at home and enjoyed the admiration of fans in the closed kingdom of the Meizu forum.  

A year has passed, and Huang Zhang remains low-key, but Meizu, China's earliest smartphone manufacturer, is gradually shedding his personal imprint.

Product Line, Speed ​​and Market

After Huang Zhang returned to Meizu, he mainly did three things: expanded the product line, introduced external investment, and took out 20% of his personal shares to launch ESOP (company employee stock ownership plan).

After receiving 2 billion yuan in financing in the middle of last year, Meizu was able to expand its product line as fast as its competitors. In the past six months, Meizu has released four products with different positioning: MX4, MX4 Pro, Meizu Blue Note, and Meizu Blue. It should be noted that Meizu only launched 5 mobile phones in the seven years from 2007 when it announced its entry into the mobile phone market to the end of 2013.

On February 1, four days after the official release of the Meizu Blue phone, Meizu officials claimed that the battery was urgently replaced with Sony and ATL due to unstable quality. The corresponding battery capacity was changed from 2610mAh to 2500mAh. If it were Meizu and Huang Zhang two years ago, such a thing would be almost impossible. The concept of cost-effectiveness and the speed of research and development were improved, but the polishing of the new product was sacrificed. The former is often more important for market success.

Historically, it is precisely because of the excessive superstition and emphasis on product details that the update and iteration of Meizu mobile phones have been too slow.

From the outside world's perspective, with the expansion of its product line, Meizu's culture has become more high-profile and open than before. However, Bai Yongxiang denied that Meizu had ever been closed, "In fact, we just really showed what we wanted to do," he said at the recent Meizu Blue product launch.

In November 2012, Bai Yongxiang told the author in his first media interview that success was not Meizu's goal. Meizu was not pursuing market expansion but the realization of a sense of self-achievement. However, today's Meizu has moved away from the pursuit of personal values ​​by Huang Zhang and other management, and has become more socialized and has more mature characteristics of a modern enterprise.

Behind these changes, Meizu is facing a market environment that is not optimistic. In terms of shipments, this mobile phone manufacturer, which was once regarded as the synonym of Chinese smartphones in 2010, sold less than 10 million mobile phones last year, which is a difficult target to catch up with Xiaomi's 70 million units.

"The competitive landscape has changed. Meizu used to believe that small is beautiful and it is better to live long than to move fast. Now we clearly feel that if Meizu does not change itself, the company's development will face great resistance. While we pay attention to products, we must also pay attention to scale." Bai Yongxiang said in an interview with Tencent Technology and other media.

Benchmarking Xiaomi

After his return, Huang Zhang not only had to untie the constraints on the development of Meizu, but also had to untie the knot in his heart left by the secret past with Lei Jun (Weibo).

Before founding Xiaomi, Lei Jun was a consultant for Meizu. He and Huang Zhang had a mutual admiration for each other, but Huang Zhang refused Lei Jun's investment and gradually fell out after Lei Jun founded Xiaomi. Many people compare the relationship between Xiaomi and Meizu to the relationship between the back wave and the front wave - the network communication and fan culture proposed by Huang Zhang were later used to perfection by Lei Jun, making Xiaomi a popular Internet mobile phone brand.

The gap between Meizu and Xiaomi in market position is closely related to the differences in the personalities of their founders. Huang Zhang, a grassroots entrepreneur, prefers to avoid the public eye, never accepts media interviews, and has a withdrawn and extreme personality; while Lei Jun, a professional manager, is high-profile, good at hype, and has a wide social network.

In the past year, Huang Zhang has become more rational and has a clearer understanding of the survival rules of the business world. This "madman" who dared to quarrel with fans in the Meizu forum has changed his past image and deleted all his past speeches in the Meizu forum. Even when a fan posted a screenshot of "Luo Yonghao criticizing Meizu" in the forum, Huang Zhang chose a mild reply like "welcome any force that can gather greater power to create greater win-win results."

Tencent Technology reviewed Huang Zhang's remarks over the past year and found that he had only caused a major stir on social media once: On September 19, Huang Zhang posted on Weibo: "If we compare hype with Luo Yonghao and Xiaomi, I will definitely lose. If we compare product development, I can beat them by several blocks." Apart from this, Huang Zhang almost disappeared from the public eye during this year and did not make any shocking remarks.

On the contrary, Meizu started to become high-profile. It reduced the price of all MX products, reached a strategic cooperation with Ubuntu, announced the completion of a new round of financing of tens of billions of yuan, built 300 experience stores in Suning, launched a new brand besides Meizu, held four press conferences in five months, and entered the smart home and wearable device market...

A series of dazzling actions makes Meizu more aggressive than ever before.

At the Meizu Blue launch event, Bai Yongxiang compared Meizu Blue with Redmi 2. He said that Meizu Blue's 5-inch screen is larger than Redmi 2's 4.7-inch screen, its CPU performance is 25% higher than Redmi 2, its GPU performance is 40% higher, its AnTuTu score of 31033 exceeds Redmi 2's 20592, and its 5-megapixel front camera also exceeds Redmi 2's 2-megapixel resolution.

After Xiaomi invested in Midea and revealed its ambition in the smart home market, Meizu, Haier and Alibaba quickly announced their cooperation and responded to capital cooperation with the concept of open cooperation.

For Meizu, facing up to the backwardness of the market positions of both parties and targeting Xiaomi to seize market share is an effective way of attack.

Bai Yongxiang previously revealed that the shipment target of Meizu mobile phones in 2015 is to reach 20 million units. Meizu announced yesterday through its official Weibo that its monthly sales in January 2015 reached 1.5 million units.

However, many netizens have complained that the Meizu Blue Note and other series of mobile phones are not available for pre-order and purchase. To some extent, Meizu may be borrowing the means of hunger marketing, but another unavoidable reality is that Meizu mobile phones have always used their own production lines. When market demand surges, the growth and stability of production capacity also face a big test.

For Meizu, the biggest challenge now is to increase production capacity and establish a complete R&D, production, channel, marketing and after-sales service system.

Of course, there is not much time left for Meizu to fight back. 2015 will be a critical juncture. To gain more opportunities in the future, Meizu must attack Xiaomi on all fronts and narrow and hold the market share gap between the two sides.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.